Plans for the Future
The original post can be found here. Disclaimer: I am a full time college student so I will not be putting a timeline on any of this happening, These are just ideas that are being passed around between me and Arre. Why I think Artero failed: Some people claim it was lack of updates or owners not caring, but I think that Artero was destined for doom simply because of our economy and gameplay (in its essence). Simply enough we didn't behave like a PK server. PKing was a horrible way to make money and was very unrewarding. People could have gear which was VERY close to the best gear without risking ANYTHING. This made the wilderness lack variety and made PKing very stale. Some times when we had 400+ people online, we only had 100-130 people in the wilderness. We essentially were an economy server with a very shitty economy (due to the inflation), but ALSO due to the fact that it was hard to make things rewarding when 90% of items are spawnable. So we failed on two ends and it made the server really really boring really quick. Also the ridiculous inflation and the prices of items deterred new players because it seemed completely unachievable (items in the PKP store cost 1000s of PKP, other items cost hundreds of thousands). TL;DR: We failed as a PK server and pking was very stale and unrewarding. New players got intimidated by prices and it made player retention really bad. What is the plan? We plan to change the server source to something more clean so the only real things we need to be processing are PKing related. Pking The pking will be "world" pvp instead of just PKing in edgeville. Since the server will pretty much only be PK based, this will make the players "closer together". So even with lets say 100 online, the PK area will be booming like when we had over 300 people online. You will receive about 1-3PKP (depending on something, maybe duration of the fight to discourage rushing newbies) per kill. Spawnables I plan to heavily limit spawning in this server. Most good items which are non-essentials will cost PKP such as: barrows, whips, dboots, defenders, furys etc. They will cost very little amounts of PKP, but will still cost something so people are almost always RISKING SOMETHING when they PK. Economy Essentially everything can be bought via PKP, and PKP can only really be obtained via PKing. This will mean if you're online on the server, you are either AFK or PKing, not much else to be doing (we will do SOME PvM and/or minigames later on in the server, once we see how things go). Currently all the items in the Artero PK store seem unattainable for new players, they cost RIDICULOUS amounts. It is way too intimidating for a new player to see claws go for "150,000 pkp" when they can barely get 1K. Items will cost REASONABLE amounts, and people should be able to set goals for items and see themselves come near that goal. Such as whips and barrows should cost about 5 PKP a piece, whilst something like an AGS would cost 350 pkp. While 350 is a lot, BUT someone can play moderately for a week and still GET an AGS. Its still something you can achieve. The small achievements (like whips and barrows) will be nice and fun, but you can also choose to save up and feel accomplished TL;DR: Items will cost less so people can actually PK their way to any item in a reasonable amount of time. It makes player retention higher because people are rewarded for pking. IMPORTANT FOR CURRENT PLAYERS The economy will be heavily scaled down, and you WILL be compensated for the items you currently have, but it might be worth less on the new server than it is currently. I don't want to flood the economy as soon as the server begins because then we have the same problems with inflation that we have now. We however do plan to refund donator point purchases in some way, this will also bring some older players back. Donating I am still debating whether donator points should EVEN EXIST, or should people donate for PKP (meaning EVERYTHING is attainable, but donating makes life easy). If a donator store exists, the items will not have ridiculous stats (like current Torva or primal kiteshield) and most likely be cosmetics anyways. SOME SPECIFICS Potions Overloads - Don't know if overloads will exist, but they will cost a LOT more than they do now - I want people to feel pain if they waste a dose Prayer potions - these will cost a little bit - I don't want people keeping their prayer at full all the time like they do currently. This will make smite fights more interesting. Leveling HP Level - I want to determine HP level based on your other level's XP instead of letting you set it yourself. This makes it so people can't make cheese combat stats with 10 hp and rush low levels. PvP Items These will be dropped randomly depending on your opponents risk. This will make things like VLS very rare, and if a new player RNGs to get one, it will be very exciting. TL;DR: I am back shortly to do a few things, and if it goes correctly, the server will live WITHOUT ANY UPDATES - because pking will be fun. Economy and server REVAMP to make it COMPLETELY PK based. Make every item in the game ACHIEVABLE for new players through hard work and dedication, not RNG. Make a lot less items spawnable to spice up PKing. If you want other content besides PKing we will have an eco server for that.